Here’s the third installment of the street freak gasser saga, which started a couple years ago with the gold and the gray ones, which were made practically at the same time, although the grey one was finished much later. When I did those two, I remember thinking for myself that I was going to do exactly the same with each and every color this casting came out in, that is, keep the stock factory paint, erase all the tampos and apply the exact same panel paint pattern, just adapted for the base color. Which is exactly what happened with this blue version, which looked like this when it came out of its blister pack.

After erasing the stock tampos with acetone and cotton dabs, having great care on not damaging the original paint, the panel paint tampos were redone in Photoshop, this time in white with blue fadeouts to have some contrast but at the same time a good combination with the metallic blue. They were then printed in white waterdecal paper and applied, all of which looked like this. As you can see, a portion of the right-front fender tampo waved a bit when the final coat of clear was applied.

The interior was also detailed. The entire piece was masked up in order to paint the dashboard in a metallic blue color to make it appear body color, it doesn’t exactly match, but it’s close enough. The seats and door panels were painted gloss black to mimic vinyl, and the rear was left in the stock chrome finish to make it look like aluminum panels where the rear seat once was.

In this gasser I wanted to use Hot Wheels American Racing Torque-Thrust-style wheels, one of the most popular Real Riders wheels, but since the “rear” wheels of these sets use humongous wheels and a low profile tire unsuitable for a gasser –or for any drag car, really- I decided to use two sets of “front” wheels; for the one I used in the rear I swapped the tires for some much meatier ones that fit the car perfectly. The problem were the front wheels, that were as deep as the rears and looked absolutely odd and disproportionate. A change for skinnier tires helped a bit but the problem was still the width of the wheel, as you can see in this next picture.

To solve this, I carefully trimmed down the wheel’s barrel with the Dremel until the skinny tires fit in the modified wheels. Even though I tried to give the trimmed plastic the best possible finish, it was never gonna look perfectly even, so I decided not to touch up the edges of the wheels with chrome paint and left them black, as if they were part of the tire, trying to hide the surgery as much as possible.

This gasser had a lot of problems during its making, I’d almost like to repeat it to eliminate the badly cut tampos of the part that warped with the clearcoat, but I really like the color combo of this thing. And yes, I’m already working on the flat black version that came out a couple years ago, with the exact same formula. I’ll show you when it’s done.